By Susan Grajek, Vice President for data, research and analytics, EDUCAUSE.

Big data and analytics are reshaping everything. Industry is using them to great effect, to better understand markets and customers, manage supply chains, and increase profits. Personalized medicine, fueled by analytics applied to big data, is poised to revolutionize healthcare. Higher education lags several paces behind these fields. Some institutions are demonstrating improvements in retention and degree completion, but most are still using data to monitor student outcomes and activities rather than predict or proactively intervene.

Certainly, trends related to analytics and data are influencing institutional IT strategy, more so than other types of trends EDUCAUSE tracks, including those related to teaching and learning and security and risk1. Data-driven decision-making, enterprise data management, and data integration issues are all already incorporated into or exerting a major influence on emerging IT strategy in at least half of US colleges and universities. Personalized learning, however, is only this influential at one in five institutions.

In 1995, the American Psychology Association (APA), through its Task Force for the analysis of the concept Intelligence, considered it as the ability to “understand complex ideas, to adapt effectively to the environment, to learn from experience, to engage in various forms of reasoning, to overcome obstacles by taking thought”.

The question we must ask when relating this concept to that of smart cities and big data & analytics is if asking the right questions of data, so that they assist us in making decisions, can help us to better adapt to the environment, learn from experience and engage in various forms of reasoning.

As a global coalition on Big Data and development, Data-Pop Alliance works together with different actors to promote a people-centered revolution on these technologies. We took advantage of the visit of its program manager, Natalie Shoup, to Barcelona to talk about the challenges and risks of Big Data and Analytics, especially regarding education and development. According to Shoup, we need to engage people both in data literacy and in the ethical and legal discussions around those technologies. Check out her reflections in the short video below.

What if all the health information we generate online was available for scientists to get relevant knowledge from it? That is the starting point of DataDonors, a campaign by The Wikilife Foundation (non-profit), which is asking volunteers to donate their online data so that researchers can produce faster knowledge on health issues. In this short video, its responsible for science programs, María Binaghi, shares with us some reflections regarding the main question of this blog. This contribution was possible thanks to the kind collaboration of the OuiShare Fest Barcelona event.

A specialist in education technology and e-learning, Darcy Hardy believes that the more data we have the better we can serve our students, but she also alerts that the information derived from that data has to be defined properly and acted upon by the correspondent administration. Check her thoughts on the blog’s main question in the short video below, where she also reflects on how analytics can be useful and about concerns linked to privacy issues. Her contribution was possible thanks to the kind collaboration of the EDEN Conference held in Barcelona.

Professor of professional development in social networks, De Laat interests in big data and analytics rely on the idea that they can make more visible and transparent what people are talking about in educational environments, making easier for other students to engage in a group with shared interests. He is also a strong defender of releasing the information obtained through analytics to students, instead of keeping it within a teaching/administrative level, so that they can use it to facilitate their own learning processes. Get De Laat’s complete reflections in the short video below. We would like to thank the EDEN Conference organisation for this contribution.

Every day we generate a huge amount of big data, but we need to resort to analytics to make abstract information meaningful and get valuable knowledge from it. In education, learning platforms let us easily gather an immense quantity of data regarding students’ behaviour, interactions, preferences and opinions. When properly analysed — through learning analytics — all these data might provide useful insight on how to make learning processes more adaptive, attractive and efficient.

Are these techniques allowing us to provide better support to our students? Are we taking advantage of big data and analytics to help shape the citizens of the future?